The Safest Place (8 page)

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure you’d find something. And you could spend more time at home then, and less time travelling.’

He looked at me incredulously. And he said, ‘Be realistic, Jane. How many marketing agencies or publishing houses do you suppose there are scattered around these fields?’

I flinched when he said that. Out here. These fields. That was how he’d started referring to this place that we both, once, so loved.

When we first moved here, the weekends were our focus; the time we would be together as a family. I shopped ahead, and I tidied the house so it would be lovely for all of us. I prepared for each
weekend as if for a holiday, planning long walks through the woods with the children, and romantic evenings, just the two of us, snuggled up by the fire. All week, my hopes were raised; the
children’s too. We lived for the weekends, back then.

The children missed their dad. If they saw him at all in the week it was by accident: a nocturnal meeting on the landing on the way to the bathroom; a glimpse of him cursing outside on a black
morning, trying to start the car. When they complained that he was never there I’d say, as though it was Christmas coming and not just another weekend, ‘Soon be here now. Not long to
go
.
’ We’d count down the days, starting with each miserable Monday. Only four/three/two more to go.

But the expectation, month in, month out, became too much; the intensity somehow crippling. It rendered the children gauche. They’d be too boisterous, too shrill in their excitement,
clambering all over David when he was tired, fighting for his attention. He’d snap at them and they’d retreat, wounded, like actors off a stage.

‘Just give me a minute,’ he’d say, guilty then. But what use was a minute to Sam and Ella, who’d waited all week just to see him?

I missed him too. I missed the closeness we used to have; the chats late into the night. He slept beside me but I hardly ever saw him awake. There is something odd, something invasive about
having a person creep into your bed at night and then out of it again in the morning, ghost-like, without you even knowing they are there, even if that person is your husband. It made me cool
towards him. I missed the affection, the closeness, of falling asleep in his arms. Most nights he saw me sleeping, naked, vulnerable. I saw him not at all.

On the rare occasions that I did still wait up for him he would come in smelling of the train and the city – a smell both familiar and alien to me now – and I’d see him moving
about my kitchen in his suit, still a part of the world I had left behind, and he seemed like a stranger. At times I felt awkward in his presence. It was too difficult to keep adjusting, and
adjusting back again. By the weekend I’d have a thousand things I wanted to talk to him about, just little snippets stored up through the week that I wanted to pass on, or gossip to share,
but when it came to it I found myself oddly silent. He was too tired; too preoccupied with his own concerns. Some weekends we’d end up barely talking at all, our time snatched away before we
had the chance to properly reconnect.

Our first winter here the worst of the weather came in the form of rain and sleet and fog, bad enough to deal with on dark country roads, but last year it snowed, hard. The
first fall came one night in mid-December, and so tenderly I look back and see my children yelping with delight in the morning, hurling themselves out into the fairytale whiteness of an untouched,
blanketed day. Theirs were not just the first footprints crunching into the snow down our lane, they were the only footprints. Ella stamped out her name; Sam ran in random circles, shaking off the
constraints of adolescence, and finally throwing himself to the ground and rolling like a puppy. They climbed the hill, with much difficulty, and skidded back down again, using the dustbin lids as
sledges, the pitch of their voices so excited, so full of delight, knifing through the stillness. They had never seen snow on such a scale before. There was no chance of school, no chance of going
anywhere in the car. For them it was wonderful.

But not for David.

Doggedly, he got up at the crack of dawn as usual while the snow was still falling, went out to get the spade from the garden shed, and tried to clear the area beside the house where the cars
were parked. I watched him from our bedroom window. With futile, angry determination he shovelled the snow away from the front wheels of the Renault, trying to dig a path down onto the road, while
the flakes kept on falling, settling on him, and still settling, almost as fast as he cleared it, on the ground. He looked so comical with snow all over his head and his shoulders, one man and his
spade against nature. Eventually he flung the spade down to the side and stood there, defeated, just staring out at the snow. Then he got in the car and started it, the engine juddering coldly,
unwillingly; the sound so at odds with the stillness of the morning. He got back out, wiped the snow off the windows, then got in again, and, incredibly, started rolling the car down onto the road.
I watched this with disbelief. He so obviously wouldn’t get very far. As well as our drive, he would have to clear the lane, and all the roads beyond.

He made it perhaps five hundred yards up the lane. Then perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, he slid the car to the side of the road, right up into the bushes. And there he left it. I watched him
get out of the car, slam the door, and start crunching his way back to the house. I ran downstairs to meet him.

‘We should have got a four-wheel drive,’ he snapped at me, forgetting he hadn’t wanted to get a second car at all. ‘Why didn’t we get a four-wheel drive?’

He stamped the snow off his shoes, shook it off his head.

I put my hand on his arm and wiped the snow from his coat. ‘There’s no point in trying to go anywhere in this,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we just go back to
bed?’

‘I can’t go back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get to work somehow. I’ve got a big meeting today.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I doubt if the trains will be running anyway.’

David stared out at the snow, his face tight with frustration. ‘God,’ he said. ‘This is impossible.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Can’t you just stay at home and enjoy it?’ I said. ‘It’s only one day.’

But it wasn’t one day, it was several. Each day, with increasing agitation, David got up and walked down the lane, inspecting the road. The snow had fallen a good ten
inches deep, and it was frozen solid. It would be madness to try and drive anywhere. It was fine for me and the children; we all thought it was huge fun, setting off on expeditions across white,
untrodden fields to the village to buy provisions, like explorers across the Antarctic. We really loved it. But for David it was hell. I did understand his anxiety. His is the kind of profession
where it is important to be seen, more so than ever these days. Be missing from your desk too long and there is always the danger that someone else might fill your place. He worked from home as
much as he could, using the computer and the phone and getting irritated if anyone accidentally interrupted him with their presence, but it wasn’t the same as being there in the office.

And the novelty of having him at home quickly wore off when he was so irritable and on edge all the time. When he wasn’t working he prowled around the house as though caged, or stood
outside just staring up the lane at the snow, as if willing it to disappear.

I felt blamed in some way, as if it was my fault that it had snowed; as if it was my fault that he was stuck at home, trapped. After all, although he never quite spelled it out, it had been my
idea to move here.

After the snow came the ice, and in many ways that was so much worse. The main roads were pretty much clear but the smaller roads, such as the roads around our house, were
treacherous. Between our house and the main road were a good three miles of twisting, narrow, unlit lanes made deadly by black ice, especially early in the morning and late at night. When I went
out, I drove at a crawl, but David, of course, was in a hurry every morning, rushing to catch that train. I’d listen to him leave, to the car disappearing, too fast, up the road and my heart
would tense, and stay tense all day. I worried about him getting to the station in the morning, and I worried about him again coming home at night, and I assume that he worried about me, too,
driving the children back and forth to school. Yet when I spoke to him at work, that concern did not properly manifest itself. Our conversations felt distant, perfunctory, like him, back there in
the land of the sharp-suited marketing man, the land that I had long left behind. He sounded a million miles away. Down the phone I could hear the background throb of the office; the occasional
raised voice; laughter. Sometimes he would have to break off from me, to speak to someone else. And when I put the phone back down after saying goodbye, the silence of my home slapped against me,
thick in my ears.

Several times, that winter, David couldn’t get home at all.

The snow had spread from us to London and the trains were running a reduced service, with frequent cancellations. He did get to work, eventually, but then he couldn’t make it home
again.

The first time, he phoned me from Paddington.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said straight away, shouting over the background noise of the station. ‘There are no more bloody trains.’

I did believe it. It had only been a matter of time till this happened, in weather like this. When we lived in London, the mere possibility of snow would disrupt the trains. Of course it would
happen, living out here. ‘Don’t go in,’ I’d said. ‘You’ll spend most of the day travelling. And what if you can’t get home again? Work at home.
You’ve got to.’

But oh no. David had to struggle on in to the office; a soldier in the field of marketing.

I said nothing. What could I say, to make things any better?

‘Now what the hell am I going to do?’ David shouted down the phone and I could hear the anguish, the utter frustration in his voice. ‘I don’t fucking believe
this.’

He spent that night in the office, sleeping on a sofa in HR. I do believe this to be true. He was so angry, so ratty and unshaven when he got home the next night, that it
couldn’t really have been otherwise.

It happened a few more times over the course of that winter; more bad weather, more cancelled trains. The strain it put on David was unbearable; like the strain it put on
us.

The second time it happened, he managed to get a room in a hotel near the station, but it was money we could ill afford. And he had no spare clothes with him, and no razor. ‘I go to work
in the morning and I don’t know if I’m going to get home,’ he ranted on the phone to me. ‘I can’t do this, Jane.’

And yet he’d no choice. It happened again, and again.

He started talking about renting a flat, in London. At weekends he’d sit at the computer, scrolling through the internet looking at grotty little bedsits and studios. But
we had no money for renting flats, and even the cheapest offerings in London were extortionate. The frustration made him angry. He sat there, picking over the details of tiny, bleak rooms in tower
blocks, or above takeaways in grim depressing streets, snapping, ‘For God’s sake!’ and, ‘This is ridiculous!’ Words bitten into the air in desperation.

Had we left our lovely part of London for him to have to go back and live in a soulless damp cell in some godforsaken post code with drug dealers for neighbours? This is what he said. Did he
work like a dog to live like a dog too? Was that part of this country dream?

The idea of him renting a flat in London was abhorrent to me. It was a step on the slippery slope, a dangerous separation. I couldn’t bear the thought of David becoming one of those men
that stayed in the city all week while we, the family, resided elsewhere. That had never been part of our plan. Of course I felt bad that his journey was so hard and his day often hideously long,
but wasn’t it worth it for us to be together, as a family? Wasn’t it worth it, for us all to be able to live out here?

‘I’m trapped, Jane,’ he said. ‘I can’t see any other way to make this work.’

‘It’s down to us to make it work,’ I said.

But he said, ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. I can’t bear the constant stress hanging over me, not knowing if I’ll get into work, not knowing when, or if, I’ll
get home again.’

‘It was only a few times,’ I said. ‘When it snowed.’

‘And what about next winter, if it snows again? What about leaves on the line in the autumn, or any other disruption? It was ridiculous to think I could commute from here. What about the
evenings I have to stay late for something – I can’t be watching the clock, thinking I’ve got to leave to make the train. How unprofessional do you think that looks?’

‘We’d never see you,’ I said simply.

And he said, ‘You don’t see me very much now.’

It seemed to be all we talked about at weekends, now, and if he wasn’t talking about it he was thinking about it. The subject hung over us like a persistent, lowering cloud.

I remember one Saturday morning we’d been invited along to the stables with the other parents for a show day; Ella was so excited but nervous too, chattering away in the back of the car
all the way there. It had been raining solidly the last few days but at last a pale sun was slanting its way through the clouds. The field was pretty much waterlogged but the show went ahead
anyway; no one was put off by a bit of mud around here. We watched Ella, her cheeks as red as apples, trotting around the field on her pony. Well, David watched Ella, and I watched him. I saw the
wistfulness, like pain, cutting tight across his brow.

‘She would never have done this if we’d stayed in London,’ I said.

He said, ‘I know.’

‘This is why we moved here,’ I said. ‘For things like this.’

Again he said, ‘I know.’ Still without looking at me he put his arm around my shoulder, and squeezed.

One evening during the long, dreary months before spring started lightening up the days David and I were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing our supper and drinking our
wine. It was a Saturday night; Max and Abbie were staying over and the children were all in the den, watching a film. Outside there was the best part of a storm going on, the rain battering against
the windows and streaming through the gap in the drainpipe, the wind rattling the guttering above. That drainpipe would need fixing tomorrow; another task to be done.